In tests I did, some DAW's use about 1-2% more CPU alone then when combined with VEP. Some DAW's were more efficient without it, but again, not by a signifcant amount. Cubase 10.0.20 was almost unusable without VEP, but they fixed that in 10.0.30, so the difference is less significant now.
This is not a huge difference and I don't think its a justification on its own for using VEP.
The bottom line is that sometimes DAW's are very efficient and sometimes they aren't. VEP happens to be very efficient IMHO, but of course you're adding another program and there will always be some overhead with that. So if the DAW happens to be inefficient, then you may gain a few CPU percentage points by using VEP to handle plugin rendering instead of your DAW. Not by a lot. But a little yes. But some other DAW's are actually more efficient on their own without it. But again, not by a lot.
In my view this should not be a determining factor for whether or not to use VEP, its not a significant enough difference.
HOWEVER...
VEP provides workflow advantages, that is the real point of using it, and the good news is that VEP is very efficient with and without a few CPU percentage points one way or the other, your computer should not really be bogged down more or less with or without it.
Unless you put VEP onto a slave computer, then obviously you just free'd up your DAW machine cpu massively.
With VEP slaves you can have instruments loaded into lots of ram. I have 128gb of ram on my 5,1 and have not been able to max it out yet, so for me that's not a factor, but if I were working professionally I would love to have a VEP slave that is just loaded 24/7 with samples and that other then crashes, never has to reload, while my DAW machine can be up and down and rebooted and run in different modes or whatever I want, work on my taxes, etc...without touching the VEP template over on the slave machine. You can do that on your DAW machine too if you ahve lots of ram, but ultimately I feel I end up taking my DAW machine up and down a lot, etc..whereas a simple VEP slave can just sit there and BE that.